Special Service and Features
IIT Madras launches minor stream in ‘Personal and Professional Development’
Objective of this minor stream is to build immersive, experiential &fun programs for students to hone essential personal, social & leadership skills so that they play to their full potential & contribute to Nation building and global impact
Indian Institute of Technology Madras  is launching a minor stream in ‘Personal and Professional Development’. An undergraduate student needs to take a basket of courses to fulfil the requirement of minoring in the stream.
The courses/programs in this stream are aimed to aid students in their personal and professional development. IIT Madras Senate recently approved the proposal to introduce a minor stream in ‘Personal and Professional Development’.
The Institute already offers several courses for personal and professional growth and leadership development. Around 1,500 students register for these courses, annually. The new minor stream will greatly boost the efforts of the Institute to transform student culture, talent and leadership and achieve holistic development.
The minor stream is open to all the students of B.Tech and Dual Degree programs while the courses offered under this program are available as elective courses to all students of IITM irrespective of the program they are in.
Highlighting the importance of such courses, Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, said,“Personal Development programs help fulfil the inner  urge to actualize one’s full potential through self-discovery, self-awareness, self-leadership and self-mastery. Specifically these programs are expected to positively impact the way of thinking in our young minds. Professional Development programs help build both interpersonal and transferable skills with an objective to meet various career aspirations of our students.”
IIT Madras students are likely to lead groups, teams, missions, companies, organisations, society, states and even the country. It’s imperative we forge future leaders with the necessary tools and skills to navigate an increasingly competitive, demanding and uncertain world with the right mindset, a greater sense of purpose and ownership, resilience and wisdom.
A strong alumni presence among the resource people and facilitators of these programs makes it a unique offering that would make it more impactful and meaningful in approach and pedagogy. Key contributors have been Prashanth Vasu, Sriram Kalyanaraman, Shyamala Rajaram, Prasanna Gunturi, Kartic Vaidyanathan, UmasankarDiddi, Sridhar Boovaraghavan, Sandhya Sekhar, Namrata Vora, Rituparna Ghosh, Vinay Kulkarni, Malati Raghunath and others among the alumni, Vijayalakshmi Venkataraman, PreetiAgalayam, Satya Seshadri, Devdas Menon, Nilesh Vasa and Srinivasan Sivakumar among faculty and Shiva Subramaniam, Gargi Sandilya, Mrinalini Ramakrishnan, Anusha MV Sriram, Parvathi Ramanathan, Sathya R Sriram and Amrutha Anand among guest faculty.
By making it curricular, it makes it possible to show employers that the IIT Madras students are already trained to contribute to an organisation’s growth and build sustainable value and sustainable wealth.”
The key components of the upcoming ‘Personal and Professional Development’ minor stream include concepts that are extracted from well-researched findings:
⮚ ‘happiness centred’ approach to living
⮚ internalizing creativity habits
⮚ play as an integral part of a leader
⮚ self-mastery, self-esteem and self-discovery
⮚ cultivating wisdom through systems thinking approaches
⮚ forging enriching relationships
⮚ sustainable living and prospering
⮚ role of an engineer in the society
⮚ cultivating innovative and entrepreneurship mindset, among other areas
The courses in this stream include more than fifteen courses  to choose from, such as Self Awareness; Happiness Habits and Success; FLOW for high performance, Systems Thinking and Discovering Creativity.